I am quite certain that bits and bytes are not an ephemeral concept, they are represented physically on the media that is supplied to the employee. It takes energy to run the media and it takes space to store the data, all of the above requires support to provide uptime, etc. Every bit created and stored on hardware of a company belongs to the company.
The other point is that anytime you use company's resources to pass a message anywhere, there is liability attached to that message. Any message can be used to sue somebody for example. If my memory isn't failing, then this quote belongs to Cardinal Richelieu: "give me 5 lines of text written by the most honest person and I'll find a reason to hang them for it".
I think in the next 5 years time we'll be observing unification of North and South Korea, all signs are pointing in that direction. The North can provide plenty of unskilled cheap labor and the South will provide the capital, tools and management. AFAIC that's the best way to resolve that conflict, of-course there will be a problem of many high government officials accepting the terms, but I am sure they can be offered cushy enough sinecure positions of power until they retire. Somalia solved their communist problem with a bloody civil war. USSR fell apart and parts of it are reconstructed under authoritarian regime. Eastern Germany became a stone on the welfare system of the Western counterpart. Let's see if Koreans find a better way to deal with the unification process (hopefully they allow for a market solution to it rather than a central planning one).
An employee uses company computer to type in bits and bytes, regardless of how they are stored or communicated to other computers, they are property of the company.
All the equipment and electricity and support that is used to manipulate them, all of it is a company resource.
Sending an email from your company account means using resources of the company and adds liability to the company in every case, that's because whatever you are sending is also 'stamped' with the company's name basically (originating address at the minimum).
Here is an analogy: you are a guest at somebody's house, you use their ink and their paper and you write a note. The ink and paper belongs to the your host, not to you. You can claim that the message is yours, but every bit of media belongs to the owner of the house.
I predicted that Obama won in August, once I saw that at the RNC convention Romney decided to declare himself a bigger Democrat than Obama.
He ran trying to out-Obama Obama and this cannot work because he'd have to get some of the Democrats on his side, but why would they vote for a Democrat running as a Republican rather than voting for a Democrat running on the Democrat ticket?
Of-course it helped Obama plenty that Bernanke voted for him but then again, Bernanke likes his position of incredible power, so that's not a surprise.
I left a number of comments on this topic back in September and August.
No, when you put your money where your mouth is that is when you can call something a prediction.
Prediction can come true or it can fail to materialise, but if you are willing to put a bet down, then it's a prediction and not just running off the mouth.
So if somebody has a second car, the car has a full tank of gas and a disaster hits. You would prevent that person from setting up a craigslist ad selling gas from his car at whatever price he wants. Hell, the price for gas could be 120 dollars in 10 years anyway. How about 1000 dollars per gallon?
There is no such thing as 'price gouging', it's political nonsense (which you are engaged in here on regular basis as well).
A person can put an ad up to sell gas at 1000000 dollars per gallon. You don't like the price? Don't buy.
No price controls work, preventing people from putting ads on craigslist is the same exact thing as telling employers that they cannot put up ads with job offers below minimum wage.
You don't like the wage? Don't take the job. You think the job will be offered at a higher wage if government declares the minimum wage above what the job offers? Most likely it won't be. If an employer is willing to hire 100 people at 4$/hour, if you force minimum wage to 8$ per hour the employer may only hire half of those people (at best). It's not like an employer has unlimited savings and it's not like every position is actually worth that money. There used to be plenty of jobs that are no longer done by people in USA (who is checking your oil at a gas pump? Is anybody bagging those groceries? Is anybody picking up the phone?)
Instead the positions will be automated, outsourced or simply would not be filled. And so there is no grocery bagger and nobody is checking your oil and windshield washing fluid, because some asshole declares it to be an illegal activity, to post a job offer at a price that he deems to be too low to be offered.
Same thing: a price is 'gouging' or the wage is must be 'minimum', all it does it prevents 2 private parties from coming to a mutually beneficial agreement and some needs to unmet, some efficiencies are not realized and some asshole in an office gets to put it into an election ad.
He is a democrat, that's why he lost. He lost back in June when during the RNC convention he basically promised to out-Obama Obama (protect Medicare, protect SS), that was it, he was done.
Why vote for a Democrat running on the Republican ticket if there is one running on the Democrat ticket?
Except you have absolutely no concrete evidence to back that up.
- your comment is using a very common trick, as the rest of people who do not understand real economics (or who is generally against real economics), you think that without a 'study' you cannot know things.
Well, you are wrong. First of all there is plenty of data showing that private deals end up costing much less, this is true in telecommunications in computing, this is true in areas of health care with little government intervention (like veterinary care or lasic eye surgery or plastic surgery).
In fact this is true in education. There are private enterprises right now that are providing superior education levels at lower prices in many parts of the world, including USA. Also Khan academy allows people to learn various subjects at a superior level and superior price (look up the price tags) than do public schools. Of-course public schools are a huge brain washing and baby sitting operations, so it's not a full comparison, but private baby sitting also costs less than taxes that go towards public education.
And no poor person would be able to get any kind student loan at all, meaning far fewer of them would be able to actually go to college.
- first of all falling prices allow poor people to buy education, just like poor people can buy LCD or Plasma TVs today, while only the wealthy and corporations could buy them just 15 years ago. Any poor person in the world has a mobile phone, even the poorest of the poor in the poorest nations, and this is done by private enterprise in search of a wider market.
Secondly far fewer people should go to college. I am convinced that college education today is worth almost nothing compared to secondary school of 50 years ago.
Obviously primary and secondary education is the parents' responsibility towards their kids. But it is not responsibility of anybody else. Now, I can see a situation where a kid is adopted, then it becomes responsibility of the new adopted parents. If a kid is an orphan, that's what orphanages are for, and here again, there shouldn't be any government involvement. Orphanages have existed before any government intervention, people do not hesitate to provide charity to orphans be it directly or via churches and other organizations, but these should be non-government organizations.
So of-course primary and secondary education should not be in the hands of a government, again, these are fundamentally responsibility of the parents and this education is just as much a product and or a service that can be delivered much more efficiently and cheaply via free market private interests.
I could start a primary school if I had an interest in it (which I personally do not) if I knew I could make money on that education. But if the government is involved, then I am not actually competing for the customers with the best product, I am competing for access to the government system that doles out money per student even to private schools (which should not happen), but I can see why this is done, after all, people are forced to pay school taxes (usually through property taxes).
Of-course I am against all public funding for anything that goes above and beyond the Constitutionally listed items, why do you ask?
Rags to riches stories are very effective when pointing to people like Carnegie, but what is more important is all the other stories, when people did not become some of the richest in the world but they did start their own companies or just became independently wealthy without having much of any education beyond ability to read, write, do arithmetic. In reality most people only use that and little else (some algebra and maybe geometry of-course, but basic stuff). AFAIC it is a myth that you need any education beyond the most basic level of it to be successful in life. Today it's much worse than that, the more education people have the more in debt they are and the worse off they are, while the old generations vote to impose higher and higher taxes and more importantly spending levels that means more taxes and inflation and borrowing anyway, so the young have their lives sucked out of them by the old, so to speak. Now that is a problem that is much more pressing than lack of higher education for the young, who end up working in menial jobs while holding their bachelors in arts or sciences.
The cost of tuition is directly tied to the ability of students to pay and has nothing to do with anything else. Like all other products, there is always a demand and at lower prices the demand is higher. Of-course when gov't subsidizes students this pushes tuitions up because the demand is artificial and really, the students do not care how much education costs if they can take government subsidized loans.
Just like in Germany they don't care how much a tuition costs, they don't care in USA. In USA there is a formality of the debt being accrued per students, but with the changes that Obama is brining in 2014 this formality will really mean nothing, any college should then just raise prices to millions and millions of dollars and provide students with everything they may want in life, houses, cars, even businesses can be bought as part of 'education program'.
In Germany the prices for education are basically mandated by the government and as such there is no incentive to find new efficiencies, there is no free market, there is no reason to find new innovative approaches to bring prices lower.
Free market provides incentives to take prices lower, that is where you are wrong. What is happening in USA today, what is happening in Germany today, etc.etc., none of it is Free Market.
Free Market is observed in cell phones and computers, not in education or health care or insurance of any kind unfortunately. Prices for education in Germany would fall if there was actual free market available. There is no reason why education with "lab work" should cost many times more than education for sociology majors, OTOH even if education in sciences is more expensive, all education should cost less.
Your numbers are: 3000 per year and 10000 per year. You are taking this for granted and that's what you have.
There is no reason why those numbers shouldn't be 300 and 1000 per year. That's where the prices would be (and lower) if there was actual free market in education similar to mostly free market in cellphones, and there is no difference in the product, all of this is a product and a service, be it mobile phones, education or health care.
Now, whether Germany will continue having this socialism for students... I give it 3 years before Germany gets out of the Eurozone itself, otherwise there will be a collapse in German economy, never mind the socialist ideas that the country has. While Greece can wait for Germany to bail it out, who is going to bail out Germany?
and imagine this, if/. moderators were moderating the Founders, when they set up the Constitution the way it was done, they would have moderated it as 'Flamebait' or 'Troll' or 'Overrated' in their infinite wisdom, because they would disagree with the founding principles of the Republic as opposed to Democracy. They would disagree with the REASONS for limiting the suffrage to a small part of population, reasons which were designed to prevent democracy from appearing, designed to prevent government to be taken over by popular ideas.
There should be no government funding in education that's how the prices would fall, once every Jim, Tom and Sally can no longer afford going to college for a sociology major, because no bank would give them a loan to go for such a useless degree. All of a sudden without government guaranteed loans there are only people going to college that can afford it and tuitions fall in price.
As tuitions fall in price, people once again can afford college by working summer jobs as they have done for decades before government screwed it up. OTOH the banks could provide credit to people who would qualify without government guarantees. This would mean that the student would have to pay at least a portion of tuition out of pocket (like a mortgage downpayment), would have to show that he is going to be able to repay the loan with interest (by explaining why the major he is taking will allow him to do so) and banks would be interested in knowing about the progress (reassessing whether the investment is still worth it) by looking at grades and such.
The tuitions for all education would fall (especially for all the humanitarian major, because who is going to pay out of pocket or go for a non-government loan to take sociology?)
Remember, people like Carnegie, (who started working at the age of 13 for 1.25 per week and became pretty much the wealthiest human in history of this planet, with an equivalent of over 300 billion USD) huge number of people who made it big and really big didn't have higher education or even secondary education in many cases.
It's not about education anyway, your college degree will not make you Carnegie, that's not how it is done.
Socialism, Fascism, Nazism all of these are subsets of the same ideology: collectivism, and collectivism resides on the idea of central planning, anti-humanism and anti-capitalism.
For example as the silly idea of international socialism lost its support in pre WWI Germany, the ultra right and ultra left Socialists combined their efforts and took hold of the ideas based on the common notion of national dictatorial socialism.
Socialism requires dictatorial power to be implemented, the French socialists knew it, the Russian socialists knew it. International socialism doesn't work at all within any particular country, because fundamentally socialism "for others" is not what people are looking for. Some worker in UK doesn't want to subsidize some farmer in India. That's why you see all of the forms of: National Democratic Parties across the West. Note the word National. As in protectionist and isolationist, and this is a necessity for a socialist or a fascist or a nazi, because collectivists are all anti-competitive capitalism, they are anti-individualism and thus they must not allow competition in the market, which searches for efficiencies.
Collectivism is based on the ideology if equality of outcomes and to achieve this, collectivist governments must abolish the Rule of Law that treats people equally without looking at their specific circumstances.
To implement 'equal outcomes' different people must be treated differently, otherwise outcomes will not be equal. The top earners have more of their earnings confiscated by that system than the bottom earners, the businesses are regulated to eliminate competition among workers, who simply sell their labour and time. All of the laws are aimed not at equality of opportunity but at equality of outcomes, and this is promoted by the tyranny of the mob - democracy.
Democracy is the key that opens the Pandora Box, because democracy allows the mob, the lowest common denominator to dominate the elections, voting for the politicians who promise more and more discriminatory treatment of individuals, to steal from some to subsidize the rest.
When any form of collectivism and democracy are mixed together, the only question becomes: what will they use as the final instrument to implement the ideology of equal outcomes? And this is where forms of nationalistic socialism (like fascism and nazism) win over any type of liberal international form of socialism (which cannot work for the reasons mentioned earlier).
That's why you see what you see in America, a mix of liberal socialism (among the ideologues) and fascism (among the elite, because that's the most effective way to implement the collectivist goals).
"Proper democratic system" is what USA government was designed by the Founders to avoid.
Republic and not Democracy, that's what is needed. People are stupid and they should not be allowed to vote directly for government. There should be a subset of people voting (that's what the electoral college is) but the problem is that it is corrupted.
The delegates are not allowed to vote their conscience basically, so the actual solution is to demand that everybody votes their conscience and not their party line and any candidate that pushes for partisan vote shouldn't even be allowed to participate.
The real problem is that people are brainwashed to believe that they need parties, that parties represent people.
Parties DO NOT represent people and certainly electoral college shouldn't be beholden to parties.
The principles that USA government was founded upon were not 'freedom', they were good self-governance.
There founders were aristocrats and they certainly would have preferred monarchy to democracy, because democracy is just another form of tyranny, except it's the form of tyranny by the stupid. The lowest common denominator that votes only for people who promise some form of a subsidy in the short term, destroying the economic stability in the long term and the Founder were right not to want any of it.
"I give you Republic, if you can keep it" - this means something, this means I give you good form of government, self-governance by design, but not democracy. I give you an experiment, try and not fuck it up by turning it into a democracy.
Suffrage was limited for a good reason. Now, I would not have ratified any Constitution that did not establish equality for all people regardless of their race, however suffrage should be limited and the change in the law that gives everybody a "right to vote" is the real fundamental problem that DESTROYED freedom in America by destroying good self-governance.
Democracy is only one step away from tyranny and that step is the good will of the voter not to go for the politician who promises something free and quick, but to elect officials who promise only one thing: uphold and defend the Constitution.
Uphold and defend the Constitution, not the president, not the Senate, not the Congress, not the SCOTUS and not even the People, but the Document, which is a set of rules without which there is no good self-governance, there is no law.
The Document today is treated as an anachronism, not as the Law and that is what allows the mobocracy. The majority simply elect themselves the government that promises to steal from some minority and to distribute to the majority. This is legalised theft, bribery and corruption.
No, the minimum wage law IS corruption! It is corruption, it is BUYING THE VOTES. How is that not corruption? That's the worst corruption that exists!
A politician promising voters something that they supposedly will get out of somebody is legalized theft and in case of minimum wage is simply legalized bribery. AFAIC all of the social agenda laws are completely corrupt on the fundamental level because those are just handouts that allow politicians to buy votes.
Look at this thread, which I started. I said something there, I said:
Why would you want to allow your State to do that to you, to throw you in jail for a year and fine you thousands of dollars for telling people how you voted?
and did you see some of the responses?
for example:
"Since you can prove you voted ${candidate}, I'll give you ${thing}"
So in this case people are 'outraged' that votes can be bought.
Well excuse me, votes are bought much before the elections day. Votes are bought with the promise of taking something from some people and giving it to others.
Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner, it's mobocracy, it's the reason why the US Founders didn't go for democracy, they preferred monarchy to democracy. They established a system with many checks and balances that would deny ability of one branch of gov't to take over for example and do something that is 'popular'.
Yet the politicians are lawyers and they figured out ways to go around laws (at first, now they are just brazen about it).
Votes are bought and sold, that's government corruption and it's done with laws just like minimum wage.
Road to Serfdom covers this topic from economic point of view. The relevant sections are: Individualism and Collectivism, Planning and the Rule of Law, Economic Control and Totalitarianism, Security and Freedom, Why the Worst Get on Top, The Totalitarians in our Midst.
So did anybody cast a vote for Vermin Supreme? After all, if he wins you'll be guaranteed to have good teeth and a pony and you'll be safe in case zombies attack.
People should be totally within their right to sell their vote.
Of-course USA was never intended to be a Democracy in the first place, a Democratic Representative Republic, that's why it is electoral college and not direct democracy for the POTUS elections.
What about laws that guarantee a certain minimum wage
- minimum wage is a breach of private property right, it's a breach of the right to associate, it's a breach of contract law, it's a complete breach of rights of individuals to come to a private agreement without any government getting in between.
From POV of economics it's a terrible law, which creates unemployment and fosters state of dependency, but of-course it is created to hide the terrible consequences of government created inflation.
In a normal free market environment, which USA experienced without government mostly throughout the 19th and the beginning of 20th century, USA had a period of slight deflation and enormous economic growth. This gave workers more and more purchasing power (and ability to buy goods and services that never existed before but were invented because of the economic and individual freedom that people enjoyed at the time). So actually the nominal wages could be falling while people could be getting more and more real purchasing power, being able to buy more for less (which you can see today in action with electronic goods and generally wherever the market is less regulated and less messed up by the government).
As to theft, murder and rape, all that, none of it is Federal issue, but AFAIC none of it should be handled by governments in any case, it's a private matter, all of it. I know most people disagree, I can understand why you'd want some central authority for this, that's simply because you don't trust yourselves, it's a sad state of affairs. You are wrong on this, but I don't push people on this point.
Certainly criminal offenses against individuals can be proven to be mostly corruption free, but they are NOT. Government uses these to punish people, government agents certainly go above and beyond these laws.
Torture, murder, theft of private property - all of this is IN the arsenal of government thugs (and they are all thugs, no exceptions). Government murders, steals and tortures with impunity, I don't see any police sirens, I don't see any criminal punishment for any of it. Are the presidents and CIA and DHS and EPA agents not under the same law, do the laws not apply to people who torture, steal and murder in the name of government?
So AFAIC there is huge amount of hypocrisy there.
You do not convince me at all that any of the things you talked about are corruption free.
Prove it. You have to prove that the law in question is not corruption. AFAIC you CAN shoot for the heck of it.
You can't murder people, and this has a very convincing proof. What is funny is the duplicity. YOU are not supposed to murder people. OTOH the government murders people all the time, be it cops or the military, they can now kill people who are Americans or not Americans, doesn't even matter.
You are throwing the case of individuals murdering other individuals, I am going to tell you this: I do not need a government law to know that murdering individuals is the wrong way to go for a person.
OTOH I haven't seen anything that proved to me that NDAA and Patriot Act and DHS has any purpose but to extend the tyranny of government power.
This is obviously a violation of the right to speech (and I do not care to call it 'first amendment', you have all the rights until the government proves that it needs authority to violate a right that you have, and the authority is defined by the Constitution, so check with your State Constitution whether it is in violation).
Here is another case of First Amendment violation by a government official. Dick Durban forced the company in question (Parkmobile), to retract their statement, which they issued, that laws passed by Senate (including one Dick Durban's amendment to 'consumer protection rights act') cause prices to go up. This is obviously true. If a credit card issuer cannot charge different fees to different people (price discrimination) based on their use patterns and such, then all prices must go up to cover the costs of the lost revenue, otherwise it can be a loss to the credit card company. I know that credit card companies are not universally loved or anything, but they have to generate a profit on their operations, not a loss, and any government law that fixes prices causes mis-allocation of resources, some sort of re-allignment of cause and effect. Any time government fixes prices that act has consequences, and they are all negative to the consumer (rising prices, fewer choices, worse quality, etc.)
So Parkmobile responds to the credit card issuer price hike by raising their prices by 13 cents and they send an email explaining why the prices went up. The Senator hears it and attacks the company, threatens it in various monetary ways, etc. This is clearly violation of the first amendment as well, Dick Durbin should be forced to resign. But hey, this is America, politicians are not held to the simple standard of upholding and protecting the Constitution, politicians are above the law.
Slashdot Mirror
I am quite certain that bits and bytes are not an ephemeral concept, they are represented physically on the media that is supplied to the employee. It takes energy to run the media and it takes space to store the data, all of the above requires support to provide uptime, etc. Every bit created and stored on hardware of a company belongs to the company.
The other point is that anytime you use company's resources to pass a message anywhere, there is liability attached to that message. Any message can be used to sue somebody for example. If my memory isn't failing, then this quote belongs to Cardinal Richelieu: "give me 5 lines of text written by the most honest person and I'll find a reason to hang them for it".
I think in the next 5 years time we'll be observing unification of North and South Korea, all signs are pointing in that direction. The North can provide plenty of unskilled cheap labor and the South will provide the capital, tools and management. AFAIC that's the best way to resolve that conflict, of-course there will be a problem of many high government officials accepting the terms, but I am sure they can be offered cushy enough sinecure positions of power until they retire. Somalia solved their communist problem with a bloody civil war. USSR fell apart and parts of it are reconstructed under authoritarian regime. Eastern Germany became a stone on the welfare system of the Western counterpart. Let's see if Koreans find a better way to deal with the unification process (hopefully they allow for a market solution to it rather than a central planning one).
An employee uses company computer to type in bits and bytes, regardless of how they are stored or communicated to other computers, they are property of the company.
All the equipment and electricity and support that is used to manipulate them, all of it is a company resource.
Sending an email from your company account means using resources of the company and adds liability to the company in every case, that's because whatever you are sending is also 'stamped' with the company's name basically (originating address at the minimum).
Here is an analogy: you are a guest at somebody's house, you use their ink and their paper and you write a note. The ink and paper belongs to the your host, not to you. You can claim that the message is yours, but every bit of media belongs to the owner of the house.
I predicted that Obama won in August, once I saw that at the RNC convention Romney decided to declare himself a bigger Democrat than Obama.
He ran trying to out-Obama Obama and this cannot work because he'd have to get some of the Democrats on his side, but why would they vote for a Democrat running as a Republican rather than voting for a Democrat running on the Democrat ticket?
Of-course it helped Obama plenty that Bernanke voted for him but then again, Bernanke likes his position of incredible power, so that's not a surprise.
I left a number of comments on this topic back in September and August.
No, when you put your money where your mouth is that is when you can call something a prediction.
Prediction can come true or it can fail to materialise, but if you are willing to put a bet down, then it's a prediction and not just running off the mouth.
There is no such thing as gouging, the word for it comes from political nonsense and complete misunderstanding of economics.
There is also no god, but there is a word.
There are also no witches, but there is a word.
There are also no unicorns, but hey, we have a word.
So if somebody has a second car, the car has a full tank of gas and a disaster hits. You would prevent that person from setting up a craigslist ad selling gas from his car at whatever price he wants. Hell, the price for gas could be 120 dollars in 10 years anyway. How about 1000 dollars per gallon?
There is no such thing as 'price gouging', it's political nonsense (which you are engaged in here on regular basis as well).
A person can put an ad up to sell gas at 1000000 dollars per gallon. You don't like the price? Don't buy.
No price controls work, preventing people from putting ads on craigslist is the same exact thing as telling employers that they cannot put up ads with job offers below minimum wage.
You don't like the wage? Don't take the job. You think the job will be offered at a higher wage if government declares the minimum wage above what the job offers? Most likely it won't be. If an employer is willing to hire 100 people at 4$/hour, if you force minimum wage to 8$ per hour the employer may only hire half of those people (at best). It's not like an employer has unlimited savings and it's not like every position is actually worth that money. There used to be plenty of jobs that are no longer done by people in USA (who is checking your oil at a gas pump? Is anybody bagging those groceries? Is anybody picking up the phone?)
Instead the positions will be automated, outsourced or simply would not be filled. And so there is no grocery bagger and nobody is checking your oil and windshield washing fluid, because some asshole declares it to be an illegal activity, to post a job offer at a price that he deems to be too low to be offered.
Same thing: a price is 'gouging' or the wage is must be 'minimum', all it does it prevents 2 private parties from coming to a mutually beneficial agreement and some needs to unmet, some efficiencies are not realized and some asshole in an office gets to put it into an election ad.
He is a democrat, that's why he lost. He lost back in June when during the RNC convention he basically promised to out-Obama Obama (protect Medicare, protect SS), that was it, he was done.
Why vote for a Democrat running on the Republican ticket if there is one running on the Democrat ticket?
Actually here is a good simple explanation to this conundrum that you are trying to solve. People should not tolerate any violence against themselves regardless of whether this seems to 'improve society', the end result is the opposite of improvement.
Except you have absolutely no concrete evidence to back that up.
- your comment is using a very common trick, as the rest of people who do not understand real economics (or who is generally against real economics), you think that without a 'study' you cannot know things.
Well, you are wrong. First of all there is plenty of data showing that private deals end up costing much less, this is true in telecommunications in computing, this is true in areas of health care with little government intervention (like veterinary care or lasic eye surgery or plastic surgery).
In fact this is true in education. There are private enterprises right now that are providing superior education levels at lower prices in many parts of the world, including USA. Also Khan academy allows people to learn various subjects at a superior level and superior price (look up the price tags) than do public schools. Of-course public schools are a huge brain washing and baby sitting operations, so it's not a full comparison, but private baby sitting also costs less than taxes that go towards public education.
And no poor person would be able to get any kind student loan at all, meaning far fewer of them would be able to actually go to college.
- first of all falling prices allow poor people to buy education, just like poor people can buy LCD or Plasma TVs today, while only the wealthy and corporations could buy them just 15 years ago. Any poor person in the world has a mobile phone, even the poorest of the poor in the poorest nations, and this is done by private enterprise in search of a wider market.
Secondly far fewer people should go to college. I am convinced that college education today is worth almost nothing compared to secondary school of 50 years ago.
Obviously primary and secondary education is the parents' responsibility towards their kids. But it is not responsibility of anybody else. Now, I can see a situation where a kid is adopted, then it becomes responsibility of the new adopted parents. If a kid is an orphan, that's what orphanages are for, and here again, there shouldn't be any government involvement. Orphanages have existed before any government intervention, people do not hesitate to provide charity to orphans be it directly or via churches and other organizations, but these should be non-government organizations.
So of-course primary and secondary education should not be in the hands of a government, again, these are fundamentally responsibility of the parents and this education is just as much a product and or a service that can be delivered much more efficiently and cheaply via free market private interests.
I could start a primary school if I had an interest in it (which I personally do not) if I knew I could make money on that education. But if the government is involved, then I am not actually competing for the customers with the best product, I am competing for access to the government system that doles out money per student even to private schools (which should not happen), but I can see why this is done, after all, people are forced to pay school taxes (usually through property taxes).
Of-course I am against all public funding for anything that goes above and beyond the Constitutionally listed items, why do you ask?
Rags to riches stories are very effective when pointing to people like Carnegie, but what is more important is all the other stories, when people did not become some of the richest in the world but they did start their own companies or just became independently wealthy without having much of any education beyond ability to read, write, do arithmetic. In reality most people only use that and little else (some algebra and maybe geometry of-course, but basic stuff). AFAIC it is a myth that you need any education beyond the most basic level of it to be successful in life. Today it's much worse than that, the more education people have the more in debt they are and the worse off they are, while the old generations vote to impose higher and higher taxes and more importantly spending levels that means more taxes and inflation and borrowing anyway, so the young have their lives sucked out of them by the old, so to speak. Now that is a problem that is much more pressing than lack of higher education for the young, who end up working in menial jobs while holding their bachelors in arts or sciences.
The cost of tuition is directly tied to the ability of students to pay and has nothing to do with anything else. Like all other products, there is always a demand and at lower prices the demand is higher. Of-course when gov't subsidizes students this pushes tuitions up because the demand is artificial and really, the students do not care how much education costs if they can take government subsidized loans.
Just like in Germany they don't care how much a tuition costs, they don't care in USA. In USA there is a formality of the debt being accrued per students, but with the changes that Obama is brining in 2014 this formality will really mean nothing, any college should then just raise prices to millions and millions of dollars and provide students with everything they may want in life, houses, cars, even businesses can be bought as part of 'education program'.
In Germany the prices for education are basically mandated by the government and as such there is no incentive to find new efficiencies, there is no free market, there is no reason to find new innovative approaches to bring prices lower.
Free market provides incentives to take prices lower, that is where you are wrong. What is happening in USA today, what is happening in Germany today, etc.etc., none of it is Free Market.
Free Market is observed in cell phones and computers, not in education or health care or insurance of any kind unfortunately. Prices for education in Germany would fall if there was actual free market available. There is no reason why education with "lab work" should cost many times more than education for sociology majors, OTOH even if education in sciences is more expensive, all education should cost less.
Your numbers are: 3000 per year and 10000 per year. You are taking this for granted and that's what you have.
There is no reason why those numbers shouldn't be 300 and 1000 per year. That's where the prices would be (and lower) if there was actual free market in education similar to mostly free market in cellphones, and there is no difference in the product, all of this is a product and a service, be it mobile phones, education or health care.
Now, whether Germany will continue having this socialism for students... I give it 3 years before Germany gets out of the Eurozone itself, otherwise there will be a collapse in German economy, never mind the socialist ideas that the country has. While Greece can wait for Germany to bail it out, who is going to bail out Germany?
and imagine this, if /. moderators were moderating the Founders, when they set up the Constitution the way it was done, they would have moderated it as 'Flamebait' or 'Troll' or 'Overrated' in their infinite wisdom, because they would disagree with the founding principles of the Republic as opposed to Democracy. They would disagree with the REASONS for limiting the suffrage to a small part of population, reasons which were designed to prevent democracy from appearing, designed to prevent government to be taken over by popular ideas.
There should be no government funding in education that's how the prices would fall, once every Jim, Tom and Sally can no longer afford going to college for a sociology major, because no bank would give them a loan to go for such a useless degree. All of a sudden without government guaranteed loans there are only people going to college that can afford it and tuitions fall in price.
As tuitions fall in price, people once again can afford college by working summer jobs as they have done for decades before government screwed it up. OTOH the banks could provide credit to people who would qualify without government guarantees. This would mean that the student would have to pay at least a portion of tuition out of pocket (like a mortgage downpayment), would have to show that he is going to be able to repay the loan with interest (by explaining why the major he is taking will allow him to do so) and banks would be interested in knowing about the progress (reassessing whether the investment is still worth it) by looking at grades and such.
The tuitions for all education would fall (especially for all the humanitarian major, because who is going to pay out of pocket or go for a non-government loan to take sociology?)
Remember, people like Carnegie, (who started working at the age of 13 for 1.25 per week and became pretty much the wealthiest human in history of this planet, with an equivalent of over 300 billion USD) huge number of people who made it big and really big didn't have higher education or even secondary education in many cases.
It's not about education anyway, your college degree will not make you Carnegie, that's not how it is done.
Socialism, Fascism, Nazism all of these are subsets of the same ideology: collectivism, and collectivism resides on the idea of central planning, anti-humanism and anti-capitalism.
For example as the silly idea of international socialism lost its support in pre WWI Germany, the ultra right and ultra left Socialists combined their efforts and took hold of the ideas based on the common notion of national dictatorial socialism.
Socialism requires dictatorial power to be implemented, the French socialists knew it, the Russian socialists knew it. International socialism doesn't work at all within any particular country, because fundamentally socialism "for others" is not what people are looking for. Some worker in UK doesn't want to subsidize some farmer in India. That's why you see all of the forms of: National Democratic Parties across the West. Note the word National. As in protectionist and isolationist, and this is a necessity for a socialist or a fascist or a nazi, because collectivists are all anti-competitive capitalism, they are anti-individualism and thus they must not allow competition in the market, which searches for efficiencies.
Collectivism is based on the ideology if equality of outcomes and to achieve this, collectivist governments must abolish the Rule of Law that treats people equally without looking at their specific circumstances.
To implement 'equal outcomes' different people must be treated differently, otherwise outcomes will not be equal. The top earners have more of their earnings confiscated by that system than the bottom earners, the businesses are regulated to eliminate competition among workers, who simply sell their labour and time. All of the laws are aimed not at equality of opportunity but at equality of outcomes, and this is promoted by the tyranny of the mob - democracy.
Democracy is the key that opens the Pandora Box, because democracy allows the mob, the lowest common denominator to dominate the elections, voting for the politicians who promise more and more discriminatory treatment of individuals, to steal from some to subsidize the rest.
When any form of collectivism and democracy are mixed together, the only question becomes: what will they use as the final instrument to implement the ideology of equal outcomes? And this is where forms of nationalistic socialism (like fascism and nazism) win over any type of liberal international form of socialism (which cannot work for the reasons mentioned earlier).
That's why you see what you see in America, a mix of liberal socialism (among the ideologues) and fascism (among the elite, because that's the most effective way to implement the collectivist goals).
"Proper democratic system" is what USA government was designed by the Founders to avoid.
Republic and not Democracy, that's what is needed. People are stupid and they should not be allowed to vote directly for government. There should be a subset of people voting (that's what the electoral college is) but the problem is that it is corrupted.
The delegates are not allowed to vote their conscience basically, so the actual solution is to demand that everybody votes their conscience and not their party line and any candidate that pushes for partisan vote shouldn't even be allowed to participate.
The real problem is that people are brainwashed to believe that they need parties, that parties represent people.
Parties DO NOT represent people and certainly electoral college shouldn't be beholden to parties.
The principles that USA government was founded upon were not 'freedom', they were good self-governance.
There founders were aristocrats and they certainly would have preferred monarchy to democracy, because democracy is just another form of tyranny, except it's the form of tyranny by the stupid. The lowest common denominator that votes only for people who promise some form of a subsidy in the short term, destroying the economic stability in the long term and the Founder were right not to want any of it.
"I give you Republic, if you can keep it" - this means something, this means I give you good form of government, self-governance by design, but not democracy. I give you an experiment, try and not fuck it up by turning it into a democracy.
Suffrage was limited for a good reason. Now, I would not have ratified any Constitution that did not establish equality for all people regardless of their race, however suffrage should be limited and the change in the law that gives everybody a "right to vote" is the real fundamental problem that DESTROYED freedom in America by destroying good self-governance.
Democracy is only one step away from tyranny and that step is the good will of the voter not to go for the politician who promises something free and quick, but to elect officials who promise only one thing: uphold and defend the Constitution.
Uphold and defend the Constitution, not the president, not the Senate, not the Congress, not the SCOTUS and not even the People, but the Document, which is a set of rules without which there is no good self-governance, there is no law.
The Document today is treated as an anachronism, not as the Law and that is what allows the mobocracy. The majority simply elect themselves the government that promises to steal from some minority and to distribute to the majority. This is legalised theft, bribery and corruption.
No, the minimum wage law IS corruption! It is corruption, it is BUYING THE VOTES. How is that not corruption? That's the worst corruption that exists!
A politician promising voters something that they supposedly will get out of somebody is legalized theft and in case of minimum wage is simply legalized bribery. AFAIC all of the social agenda laws are completely corrupt on the fundamental level because those are just handouts that allow politicians to buy votes.
Look at this thread, which I started. I said something there, I said:
Why would you want to allow your State to do that to you, to throw you in jail for a year and fine you thousands of dollars for telling people how you voted?
and did you see some of the responses?
for example:
"Since you can prove you voted ${candidate}, I'll give you ${thing}"
So in this case people are 'outraged' that votes can be bought.
Well excuse me, votes are bought much before the elections day. Votes are bought with the promise of taking something from some people and giving it to others.
Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner, it's mobocracy, it's the reason why the US Founders didn't go for democracy, they preferred monarchy to democracy. They established a system with many checks and balances that would deny ability of one branch of gov't to take over for example and do something that is 'popular'.
Yet the politicians are lawyers and they figured out ways to go around laws (at first, now they are just brazen about it).
Votes are bought and sold, that's government corruption and it's done with laws just like minimum wage.
Road to Serfdom covers this topic from economic point of view. The relevant sections are: Individualism and Collectivism, Planning and the Rule of Law, Economic Control and Totalitarianism, Security and Freedom, Why the Worst Get on Top, The Totalitarians in our Midst.
I also suggest The Law by Bastiat.
So did anybody cast a vote for Vermin Supreme? After all, if he wins you'll be guaranteed to have good teeth and a pony and you'll be safe in case zombies attack.
People should be totally within their right to sell their vote.
Of-course USA was never intended to be a Democracy in the first place, a Democratic Representative Republic, that's why it is electoral college and not direct democracy for the POTUS elections.
What about laws that guarantee a certain minimum wage
- minimum wage is a breach of private property right, it's a breach of the right to associate, it's a breach of contract law, it's a complete breach of rights of individuals to come to a private agreement without any government getting in between.
From POV of economics it's a terrible law, which creates unemployment and fosters state of dependency, but of-course it is created to hide the terrible consequences of government created inflation.
In a normal free market environment, which USA experienced without government mostly throughout the 19th and the beginning of 20th century, USA had a period of slight deflation and enormous economic growth. This gave workers more and more purchasing power (and ability to buy goods and services that never existed before but were invented because of the economic and individual freedom that people enjoyed at the time). So actually the nominal wages could be falling while people could be getting more and more real purchasing power, being able to buy more for less (which you can see today in action with electronic goods and generally wherever the market is less regulated and less messed up by the government).
As to theft, murder and rape, all that, none of it is Federal issue, but AFAIC none of it should be handled by governments in any case, it's a private matter, all of it. I know most people disagree, I can understand why you'd want some central authority for this, that's simply because you don't trust yourselves, it's a sad state of affairs. You are wrong on this, but I don't push people on this point.
Certainly criminal offenses against individuals can be proven to be mostly corruption free, but they are NOT. Government uses these to punish people, government agents certainly go above and beyond these laws.
Torture, murder, theft of private property - all of this is IN the arsenal of government thugs (and they are all thugs, no exceptions). Government murders, steals and tortures with impunity, I don't see any police sirens, I don't see any criminal punishment for any of it. Are the presidents and CIA and DHS and EPA agents not under the same law, do the laws not apply to people who torture, steal and murder in the name of government?
So AFAIC there is huge amount of hypocrisy there.
You do not convince me at all that any of the things you talked about are corruption free.
Prove it. You have to prove that the law in question is not corruption. AFAIC you CAN shoot for the heck of it.
You can't murder people, and this has a very convincing proof. What is funny is the duplicity. YOU are not supposed to murder people. OTOH the government murders people all the time, be it cops or the military, they can now kill people who are Americans or not Americans, doesn't even matter.
You are throwing the case of individuals murdering other individuals, I am going to tell you this: I do not need a government law to know that murdering individuals is the wrong way to go for a person.
OTOH I haven't seen anything that proved to me that NDAA and Patriot Act and DHS has any purpose but to extend the tyranny of government power.
This is obviously a violation of the right to speech (and I do not care to call it 'first amendment', you have all the rights until the government proves that it needs authority to violate a right that you have, and the authority is defined by the Constitution, so check with your State Constitution whether it is in violation).
Here is another case of First Amendment violation by a government official. Dick Durban forced the company in question (Parkmobile), to retract their statement, which they issued, that laws passed by Senate (including one Dick Durban's amendment to 'consumer protection rights act') cause prices to go up. This is obviously true. If a credit card issuer cannot charge different fees to different people (price discrimination) based on their use patterns and such, then all prices must go up to cover the costs of the lost revenue, otherwise it can be a loss to the credit card company. I know that credit card companies are not universally loved or anything, but they have to generate a profit on their operations, not a loss, and any government law that fixes prices causes mis-allocation of resources, some sort of re-allignment of cause and effect. Any time government fixes prices that act has consequences, and they are all negative to the consumer (rising prices, fewer choices, worse quality, etc.)
So Parkmobile responds to the credit card issuer price hike by raising their prices by 13 cents and they send an email explaining why the prices went up. The Senator hears it and attacks the company, threatens it in various monetary ways, etc. This is clearly violation of the first amendment as well, Dick Durbin should be forced to resign. But hey, this is America, politicians are not held to the simple standard of upholding and protecting the Constitution, politicians are above the law.